“I am an experimental seismologist. That means I spend a lot of time looking at data about the earth. … I am also a musician and I sometimes hear the data. This data is like a graceful minuet accelerating into a frantic jig. … I find these graphs terrifying and I struggle to understand why so many people accept this without fear.”
Dr. Jones is referring to the temperature data in the graph below, which correlates with the atmospheric CO2 data.
Global temperature anomaly according to 4 independent research groups (orange, pink, maroon, and purple lines) plotted on top of atmospheric CO2 data from ice cores (green) and direct atmospheric measurements (blue). Global temperature has been rising since around 1880, lately at a markedly accelerating rate, in correlation with atmospheric CO2 concentration. All data publicly available, downloaded and plotted by me (for details, see here).
In a newly published composition years in the making, Dr. Jones translates the actual temperature data since 1880 into a compelling musical piece in a baroque period tradition called In Nomine, in which one instrument plays a steady melody. She assigns Earth’s temperature to falling or rising notes in that melody, illustrating in song the accelerating ascension of our Earth’s temperature and its growing urgency.
Click below to watch a music video of In Nomine Terra Calens: In the name of a warming Earth.
“Dealing with climate change means investing in the future. Look again at the consequences of our current trajectory. The true threat to modern life is not dealing with climate change. I end In Nomine Terra Calens with a stripping away of harmonies to finally land on one, lone, very high note. I end without direction to represent the uncertain future. We stand at a decision point where the future of the world really rests on our decisions.
Credit: NASA/RESOURCEWATCH. Satellite imagery of the November, 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The deadliest and most destructive California wildfire in history, the Camp Fire burned an area of 240 square miles, destroyed 18,804 structures, decimated the town of Paradise (pop. 26,000) and neighboring communities and killed at least 85 people.
“The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”
–Rachel Carson (1907-1964), marine biologist and nature writer, author of Silent Spring, a book that documented, with scientific evidence and a composite of true accounts, environmental and human health harms of DDT and the potential catastrophic consequences of over-use of toxic and persistent chemicals. Controversial in its time, the bestselling book engendered fierce and personal attacks on Ms. Carson by chemical companies, and is now often credited with having raised awareness of environmental challenges resulting in the creation of Earth Day and the EPA. The above quote seems relevant still, as we have made great progress in improving our air and water quality but are acutely aware of the easily observable affects and potential irreversible consequences of unfettered dispersal of another persistent chemical, fossil carbon dioxide.
Image credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Photograph of Our Earth taken by Voyager 1 on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 1990, during its last photographic assignment as it departed to the fringes of our solar system. Carl Sagan had suggested the probe take a last “family portrait” of the planets, ultimately convincing JPL leadership the assignment had humanitarian value despite its lack of any scientific use. At a distance of 4 million miles from the sun, Voyager 1 turned its camera around and took a series of 39 wide-angle and 21 narrow-angle color photos. In the narrow-angle photo above, Our Earth appears as a point of light only 0.12 pixel in size. By chance, Our Earth was the only one of the imaged planets to appear suspended within a scattered ray of light, a result of the photo being taken so close to the sun.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Image credit: JPL. Voyager 1‘s planetary family portrait. Mercury and Mars eluded the camera because they were lost in the glare of the nearby sun. Pluto, still considered a planet at the time, was too dim to see.
Photo of our Earth and moon taken by the Galileo probe as it flew by on its way to Jupiter in 1992. (Dr. Amanda Hendrix, quoted here, was co-investigator on Galileo’s ultraviolet spectrometer instrument.) All 5.5 billion humans in the universe in 1992 were in this image. Now there are 7.7 billion of us, and we’re all in the same place. Our collective future depends on our knowledge of that blue sphere and the actions we take together based on that knowledge.
“But will we choose a different road? Your guess is as good as any scientist’s. Human decisions remain the main source of uncertainty in climate change, not the physical response of the climate itself. The confidence level of the physical predictions for many years has exceeded the certainty we need for other big choices, such as when we decide economic policies or court cases. But predicting the human component of reducing carbon emissions depends on politics and social psychology, which constantly surprise the best experts.
Carbon reduction depends on peace between nations. And changing climate could be a great impetus to war. The physical sciences have found many feedback loops by which warming begets more warming, but the social science connection of carbon and conflict could be the most powerful of all.”
“Exercising my ‘reasoned judgement,’ … I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.”
-U.S. District Court of Oregon Judge Ann Aiken, November, 2016, in a 54-page opinion and order denying the U.S. federal government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit, filed against the federal government by 21 kids currently ranging in age from 11 to 22, asserting that the federal government has “known for more than fifty years that the carbon dioxide … produced by burning fossil fuels was destabilizing the climate system in a way that would ‘significantly endanger plaintiffs, with the damage persisting for millenia’,” and demanding that the government desist from subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions
Read here about the 36,000 pages of documentary evidence gathered by the plaintiffs for the case, much of it the government’s own documents spanning 50 years and 10 presidencies.
Since 2016, the Trump Administration has appealed Judge Aiken’s decision three times to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and twice to the Supreme Court. All 5 appeals failed.
The next oral arguments in Juliana v. United States are scheduled for June in Portland, Oregon.
To minimize her carbon footprint, Greta took a 32-hour train ride to Davos from her home in Sweden and slept in a tent while at the WEF Annual Meeting.
“Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.
And please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale. Nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas being released from the thawing Arctic permafrost.
At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge that we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.
But Homo sapiens have not yet failed.
Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognize the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance.
We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.
You say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5 °C of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t.
Now we all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the future living conditions for humankind. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.
That is up to you and me.
Some say that we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?
Here in Davos – just like everywhere else – everyone is talking about money. It seems that money and growth are our only main concerns.
No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of future and present economics.
We are now at a time in history where everyone with any insight of the climate crisis that threatens our civilization – and the entire biosphere – must speak out in clear language, no matter how uncomfortable and unprofitable that may be.
We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint is, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility.
Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”
-Greta Thunberg, 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who has inspired teens around the world with her Climate Strike campaign. Full text of her speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 25, 2019.
I hate you and love you
all at the same time
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to
but we tend to leave you behind
These hands were made for loving but all we do is fight
I wish we could combat the monsters inside
and love was made for people but people are filled with greed
we take what we want and expect it to be free
Now our hearts are empty, now our hearts are bare but we still take what we want and expect it to be there
It’s just plain and simple, we lost everything
and now we can’t hear the song that human nature sings
It goes
Oh
save me
help me
Caged in this life we try to hide behind TV’s it’s all about me perpetuate the planet ’till it’s gone, and then we’ll have it
won’t we?
it’s all about me
These hands were made for loving but all we do is fight I wish we could combat the monsters inside
and love was made for people but people are filled with greed
we take what we want and expect it to be free
Now the world is empty, now the world is bare
but we still take what we want and expect it to be there
It’s just plain and simple, we lost everything
and now we can’t hear the song that human nature sings
It goes
Oh save me help me oh
oh
save me
help me
save me
help me
-Lane Burke and Eliot Hester. “Human Nature.” Novel, Vol. 1, The 5th Records, 2019.
Beautiful song, worth a listen. Insightful lyrics, worth some thought. Check it out on iTunes.
“My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old. I am from Sweden.
I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now.
Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn’t matter what we do.
But I’ve learned you are never too small to make a difference.
And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.
You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.
Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.
Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.
The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act.
You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.
We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.
We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again.
We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.
We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.
Image credit: John D. Sutter. A group of students, inspired by Greta’s climate movement, who walked into the COP24 conference center in Katowice, Poland on Friday and held signs that, together, say “12 years left,” a reference to the recent IPCC climate report which concludes global climate goals to avoid the worst consequences of climate change could become impossible to achieve in about 12 years without swift actions to decarbonize the world economy.
“We’re going to defend first and foremost existing federal greenhouse gas standards. We’re defending them because they’re good for the entire nation. No one should think it’s easy to undo something that’s been not just good for the country, but good for the planet.”
-Xavier Becerra, Attorney General of California, indicating to The New York Times his state’s determination to defend its right to maintain the current federal auto emission targets within its borders, in the face of the EPA’s impending plans to roll back those emission standards
According to reporting by The New York Times, my buddy Scott Pruitt’s EPA is planning to announce in the next few days its plans to significantly roll back the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards adopted in 2012 under an agreement, at the time, with Ford, GM, Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar/Land Rover, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, and Volvo, as well as the United Auto Workers (UAW). The regulations adopted at that time in agreement with these automakers — which account for over 90% of vehicle sales in the U.S. — require automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
It is also a goal that is achievable. This EPA website (live link, saved image in case it gets deleted) summarizes technologies available now or nearly developed that could meet this goal. It’s not as if all new cars would need to be Tesla’s by 2025. The enabling technologies include (for a standard gasoline engine car):
Variable valve timing and lift, cylinder deactivation, and turbocharging;
Electric power steering;
Turning off the engine when the car is stopped;
Fuel-efficient tires and aerodynamics;
Weight reduction materials;
8-speed transmissions.
As an engineer, I assess that the implementation of these technologies by 2025 would be butter. The fully electrified, fully hybrid cars we normally identify with environmental friendliness would be icing on the cake.
The EPA assesses (right now) that the above technologies could increase average fleet fuel economy from around 35 mpg now to around 53 mpg in 2025, reducing oil consumption by about 12 billion barrels and reducing CO2 pollution by about six billion tons over the lifetime of all the cars affected by the regulations, while the average vehicle cost would rise from about $25,000 to about $27,000 (an increase of less than 10%).
Right now, only Canada and the U.S. have committed themselves to such aggressive fuel efficiency standards by 2025. Presumably, since the goals appear achievable, this would be a great way for Canada and the U.S. to place themselves in a technological leadership position in a world in which all nations except three have committed themselves to the Paris climate agreement.
In March, 2017, at a Detroit auto research facility, President Trump said, “I’m sure you’ve all heard the big news that we’re going to work on the CAFE standards so you can make cars in America again.” What is he talking about? We are the people who put astronauts on the moon! As a professional engineer, I guarantee you engineers at Ford, GM, Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar/Land Rover, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, and Volvo are not shrinking from the challenge of implementing valve timing and lift, cylinder deactivation, turbocharging, electric power steering, turning off the engine when the car is stopped, and 8-speed transmissions by 2025.
Today’s future requires vehicles that enable our rapid movement without destroying our atmosphere. Perhaps our federal legislature should offer a financial award for the first to produce a practical substitute for gas guzzling, CO2 spouting, global warming, inefficient internal combustion engines. Oh, except wait, we already have them!
California argues it should be able to maintain the current standards. It has a special waiver under the 1970 Clean Air Act empowering it to enforce stronger air pollution standards than those set by the federal government. And it means to exercise that waiver in all of our interest. 12 other states including New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania have historically followed its lead, making up together more than one-third of the U.S. auto market.
Federalism may save us from the worst, as these 13 states could force automakers to choose between dividing their product offerings between two separate markets or simply doing the right thing. To my friends and family in California, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, THANK YOU for your leadership!
I submit it would be the height of hypocrisy for the GOP, the party of small government and states’ rights, to argue that California should not be allowed to define tighter emission standards within its own borders.
Image credit: Modern Mechanix. Image of a short article that appeared in the August, 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine.
This article, which appeared in the August, 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, references the work of Dr. Gilbert Plass, a Canadian physicist who had just begun using some of the world’s first high-speed computers to perform accurate calculations of infrared absorption of sun radiation in all layers of our Earth’s atmosphere. The many calculations required could not have been accomplished by hand. The layer-by-layer atmospheric radiation model Dr. Plass constructed provided the first decisive proof that carbon dioxide additions to the atmosphere could be expected to increase our Earth’s surface temperature. (This had been suspected since the 1800’s, but reasonable scientists disagreed and the dispute could not be settled without more accurate data or computations.)
I have tried to find out what computers Dr. Plass used, but I can’t find that information published anywhere. The IBM 701, pictured below, was the first mass produced computer and was introduced just a few months before the above article.
Image credit: ComputerHope.com. Photograph of an IBM 701 computer, the first mass produced computer, introduced on April 7, 1953. It had 1.28 kB of memory and could perform 2,200 multiplications per second. 19,701 computers were sold.
Dr. Plass’ predictions in the above article, later refined in a series of scientific papers he published in 1956, have proven remarkably accurate. If you want to learn more about how Dr. Plass’ work fits into our knowledge of climate change, check out Episode 3 of my Brief History of Climate Change Evidence. To see just how well Dr. Plass’ predictions held up, check out Episode 7, where we look at modern temperature measurements and grade his work.
Spoiler alert: It’s been 65 years since the above article; lots of accurate measurements have been made by scientists all over the world, and the article was pretty much right on.
